Chase Your Shadow (15 page)

From all this scattered noise various websites bloomed, the most visited of which was one titled ‘Support for Oscar Pistorius’, where bloggers posted mainly in English but also in Spanish, French, Italian, German and Afrikaans. Inspirational quotes popped up there daily, letters written as if to a loved one, poems too. A theological thread ran through many of the bloggers’ epistles, with much mockery of the ‘non-believers’ and invocations made to ‘the Lord’, who was believed to be unambiguously on their idol’s side. A typical extract read, ‘Because what happened is ugly and their hearts are malevolent, they want to strip Oscar of his beauty too, attack him in the darkness while he is unable to defend himself. Another cruel irony, for Oscar has never been a man to curse the darkness. Oscar has always had a wider vision than most of us. He has taught us tolerance and acceptance.’ Pistorius, exemplar and teacher, belonged to the world of light; his enemies, to the infernal shadows.

Mira, a German woman who put up the ‘Support for Oscar’ website and selected its content, underlined the chief article of Pistorian faith. ‘We, the owners of this blog,’ it read, ‘are a group of loyal supporters . . . We have not met Oscar, and it is unlikely that we ever will . . . We do this because we respect and believe in him wholeheartedly.’

The Pistorians did more than believe his version of events. They believed
in
him, despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that the vast majority had never spent any time with him and could not vouch for him as a flesh and blood person. Except, that is, for the two women from Iceland. In December 2013 they sent him a message on the ‘Support for Oscar’ website. Alongside a picture of a little girl
and a little boy, the message read, ‘Our dearest Oscar, merry, lovely Christmas to you and your loved ones. Much love.’

Ebba Guðmundsdóttir was the two children’s mother; Sigga Hanna Jóhannesdóttir, Ebba’s mother. Ebba Guðmundsdóttir stood out in a country where women tended to be tall, blonde and blue-eyed. In physical terms, she might have fitted in better in multi-racial South Africa. Her hair was dark brown, her eyes were green, her skin olive-colored, suggesting that there might have been some rare dilution of the Viking Icelandic line somewhere in her family’s past. A writer of books and presenter of TV programs on cooking healthily for children, she brimmed with cheerful energy.

Early in 2005, Ebba, then in her late twenties, became pregnant for the second time. Her first child had been a girl and this one, an early scan revealed, would be a boy. Her husband, Hafthor Haflidason, was thrilled. He was a soccer fanatic who made a living as a players’ agent working with the big European leagues. The prospect of having a little boy to kick a ball around with him filled him with delight. He and Ebba could not have been happier. Twenty weeks into the pregnancy, she went to the hospital for another scan.

Sitting eight years later in a café in Reykjavik, a capital with the air of a small fishing town, with little houses whose bright colors stood in contrast to the grey vastness of the North Atlantic, she recalled, in perfect English, what happened next.

‘The radiologist who did the scan suddenly turned pale,’ Ebba said. ‘She looked and looked again at the blurred black and white photograph but struggled to make out the shape of the legs, which she said were in a very strange position. She left the room for a second opinion, looking really worried. I began to cry. When she returned she was almost hysterical. She said parts of the legs seemed to be missing.’

It turned out that neither the radiologist nor the doctor she had
stepped out to consult had ever come across anything like this before, not even in medical textbooks.

‘I could only conclude from what she told me that I was carrying a severely disabled child,’ Ebba said. ‘Despair is not the word. It is not strong enough.’ She began to imagine that maybe there was worse news to come, that perhaps the child would be born with mental problems. ‘I went to bed that night sure that my son would be so disabled he would not have a life. I remember thinking I hoped I’d miscarry, that something would happen so my child would just die.’

The next morning she and her husband met with a group of doctors who had been studying the sonogram photo and trawling for information outside Iceland about what condition they might reveal. The problem remained grave, the doctors said, but not as dire as they had initially feared. Everything was as it should be except for one thing. The fibulas were missing from both the foetus’ legs. Their child would be born with a condition never encountered before in Iceland: fibular hemimelia.

‘We returned home and felt a little better,’ said Ebba. ‘Not good, obviously, but my darkest thoughts had gone. I no longer wanted to have a miscarriage.’ Her husband sat down at his computer and searched the internet to try and find out what the implications of fibular hemimelia would be for their son. Suddenly something caught his eye. He called his wife to come quickly and take a look. It was a photograph of someone they had never heard of who had been born with exactly the same condition as their unborn child. His name was Oscar Pistorius.

‘The photograph filled the computer screen,’ Ebba said, her face lighting up as she relived the moment. ‘It was the most wonderful thing! Oscar was crossing the finishing line, breaking the tape, winning the gold at the 200 meters Paralympic race in Athens. Seeing that
picture changed everything! It captured a moment of triumph for him and for us it was the moment we moved not just from despair to hope, but to knowing our son would be just fine. I felt the purest relief and joy. My son would not just be able to walk, he would be able to run!’

The boy, who would be named Haflidi, had a role model even before he was born, his mother having decided there and then that there was more to the youth who appeared on the screen than a miraculous ability to run very fast. ‘He was beautiful, smiling and we could see in the picture he was a kind young man, and my husband sent my mum the link and I have loved Oscar ever since and our whole family has too. We became his number one fans, following every race he ran, learning all we could about his life.’

Ebba found her own role model in Pistorius’s dead mother. She saw Sheila Pistorius as a pioneer and guide who had marked out the path she herself should follow. Like Sheila, Ebba would never feel sorry for herself or her son; she would always regard him as being capable of anything a child with legs could do.

‘I often wanted her to be alive for me during that first year after Haflidi was born because there is no manual for raising a boy like him,’ Ebba said. ‘It must have been so difficult for her. She had no one to turn to. She lacked completely the example she became for me.’ Ebba understood better than anyone could have done how difficult it would have been for Sheila Pistorius to decide on the best medical response to her son’s condition during his first year of life. ‘There was no internet to find information and she had to go from doctor to doctor, hearing all kinds of different advice. There was even one doctor who told them they should amputate above the knees! They play God, some of these doctors, and it is hard for normal people to know when they are just talking nonsense. Oscar’s mother had to have been so strong and so brave to make that decision. In Iceland they certainly
had no clue what to do. I saw the result of that one day when I saw a boy who was fourteen and had also been born with a problem in his feet. He had not been amputated and he was clearly handicapped, in a wheelchair. But I had the example of Oscar in front of me and that made it so much easier for me than for his mother. It decided the question for me completely.’

One thing was making the rational choice to amputate; another was dealing with it emotionally. As Haflidi approached the age of eleven months, the point at which – following the Pistorius precedent – the surgery would be carried out, she tried to keep outwardly calm, but inside she was in a state of creeping terror, unable to avoid picturing the moment when her baby would be strapped down unconscious on an operating table with a surgeon sawing off his feet.

And then she discovered that, weeks before the operation was due, Pistorius himself was coming to Iceland.

Ebba wrote him an e-mail introducing herself and telling him about Haflidi. He wrote back swiftly. ‘Hi,’ he said, ‘how can I help you?’ He could help, she replied, by coming round to her home for dinner. He said he would be happy to do so.

When he arrived in Reykjavik Ebba’s husband went to issue the invitation personally at an indoor sports facility where he was testing his new Cheetahs. Hafthor was ready to be amazed. Since winning Paralympic gold at Athens the young man who had already changed his life had been competing ever more seriously in able-bodied races. Just a few months before he had come sixth in the national South African 400 meters race. But nothing had prepared Hafthor for the spectacle that greeted him. Pistorius and Trevor Brauckmann were kicking a football back and forth. Pistorius was wearing his usual walking prostheses, their metal cores covered in flesh-colored plastic, moulded in the shape of real human legs, complete with ‘feet’ over which he wore
normal trainers. What made Hafthor’s jaw drop was that Pistorius was not simply nudging the ball along the ground towards his companion, as he might have done with a hockey stick, but performing tricks. He would hold the ball on the ground between his two lifeless feet and, with a little backward jump, hoist it in the air behind him and over his head. It was the kind of thing Hafthor would watch his professional players do in training, but he had never imagined that a man born with the same condition as his son might be capable of the same thing.

When Pistorius walked into the house for dinner that evening Ebba said it felt as if she were meeting a rock star. It was the very term Reeva Steenkamp would use to describe him, and the qualities Ebba saw in him that day were also the gentler ones that would persuade Reeva to invest her love in him seven years later.

‘He was only nineteen then,’ Ebba said, ‘but he had a big, confident personality. He laughed a lot but he was also extraordinarily polite, with no pretensions. He held Haflidi in his arms, he played with our daughter Hannah. You could see he was one of those adults who is natural with children. I asked him if he would mind taking off his legs. He didn’t. He just took them off with no self-consciousness and let me stare at them. I was fascinated and so happy.’

Pistorius might have suffered a jolt on seeing in the Icelandic baby a vision of himself that he had never beheld before. That was him before the amputation, with the mangled feet and misshapen ankles. But if it was a shock, he gave nothing away. He looked so at ease with his new friends, and held the little child with such manifest delight, that Ebba’s infatuation with him only grew. She hung on his words as if they were the Sermon on the Mount. Especially when he talked about his mother, whom he described as his life’s guiding light and to whom he said he offered up a prayer before every race he ran.
He told them she had made no concessions to his condition, treated him no differently from his older brother or his younger sister, and how grateful he would always be to her for that. He recounted his favorite story about her telling his brother to put on his shoes and him to put on his legs; he spoke about the letter in which she said that the real loser was the one who did not compete. And he shared with them his favorite aphorism, ‘You are not disabled by the disabilities you have; you are able by the abilities you have.’ He rejected the term ‘disabled’, he said; he preferred what he saw as the more accurate ‘differently abled’.

This was manna from heaven for Ebba. Years later, in that cafe in Reykjavik, she recalled the encounter with rapture. ‘The compassion he showed! The empathy! The kindness! Everything I had seen in that first photograph was confirmed, and so much more. In the flesh he exceeded my expectations. And he also drew from me something I did not expect: learning that he had no mum, I felt a strong impulse to mother him myself.’

That dinner, Ebba said, was a defining moment in her life. ‘It taught me the very important lesson that I should not be overprotective with my son and, most of all, sealed my peace with Haflidi’s condition,’ she said. And it gave her a mission: to be for her son what Pistorius’s mother had been for him. While not religious in the same intense way that Sheila Pistorius had been, Ebba sounded as if she were channeling Sheila when she said, ‘I think there is a purpose for Haflidi in not having legs. We don’t want him to have legs! I know that sounds a bit crazy but I want him the way he was supposed to be. Oscar told us that if he had a choice between legs and a Ferrari he’d choose a Ferrari! He has had lots of opportunities on account of having no legs. My son the same, even if he is not yet eight years old. He may not have legs but he has a big heart. You lose something but get something else
instead. You can’t have it all. If something is missing, you compensate, and people love him so much and are so kind to him.’

Including Pistorius himself, who visited Iceland again in the summer of 2007 and went to dinner with the family again, where he sat with Haflidi, now nearly two, on his lap and spoon-fed him, then posed for photographs with him, the two of them with their prostheses off, the famous athlete happy to play big brother to the kid with the same thin stumps as himself. Haflidi knew he was different from other people, but he was a confident, cheerful little boy, mature for his age, who would stand up before his class at school and give talks explaining his condition. Yet, Ebba said, he also grew up not considering himself disabled. Nor did she consider him so. ‘We would tell people, “No, our son is not crippled, no need to be sorry or sad. He will be like Oscar Pistorius – beautiful, brave, perfect.” I believe my son will do whatever he likes in life and I owe that belief to Oscar. He showed me that not having legs is no big deal, that if people with no legs can run then they can do anything.’

Haflidi himself showed no interest in athletic competition and always came cheerfully last in school races. But Ebba loved watching Pistorius run. She did so on TV or on the internet whenever she could, and she went to watch him live at the track. In May 2009 she, her husband, their two children and her mother, Sigga Hanna, traveled to Manchester to see him compete in the Paralympic World Cup. Before watching Pistorius race they spent a day touring the neighboring city of Liverpool with him. Anyone who did not know them would have imagined they were all part of the same family. Pistorius walked hand in hand with Haflidi and, all politeness, insisted on carrying Sigga Hanna’s backpack. The next day at the running stadium he had another gesture for his Icelandic friends. After winning gold on the track he clambered into the stands where the public sat, sought out
Haflidi and hung his medal around the boy’s neck. At dinner, Pistorius and Sigga Hanna fought good-humoredly over who should pay and when they stepped out of the restaurant Sigga Hanna declared, only half jokingly, that she would like to adopt him.